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Federal authorities discussed combing through state driver license records and traffic tickets as they scrambled to boost the number of criminal illegal immigrants deported from Georgia and other states last year, records show.
Emails sent by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to regional offices in Atlanta and other cities show the agency also considered sending officers to local traffic safety checkpoints and jails. One revelation in the emails: ICE’s Atlanta office was chastised as a laggard in the quest to hit deportation targets and keep the paymasters in Congress happy.
ICE officials say they ultimately did not move forward with most of the ideas for netting more criminals. Still, the prospect of random inquiries, with the potential to affect many blameless people, has alarmed civil and immigrant rights activists. They worry such tactics would violate privacy and lead to racial profiling.
Conversely, a champion of tougher immigration enforcement called some of the measures not just reasonable but desirable.
The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina first obtained ICE’s email records under the Freedom of Information Act last year. USA Today recently reported on the contents of those records.
ICE laid out its plans by email amid the Obama administration’s efforts to close low-priority deportation cases while refocusing enforcement on those who have committed serious crimes.
Last April, David Venturella, then ICE’s assistant director for field operations, warned ICE’s regional office in Atlanta that it had expelled 1,200 fewer criminal illegal immigrants than it had during the comparable period the previous year.
“The only performance measure that will count this fiscal year is the criminal alien removal target,” he wrote.
Critics have interpreted his wording as a quota for deportations, though ICE denies it has any such quotas. The agency, however, said Congress requires it to submit “performance goals” as part of its budget process.
“These performance goals reflect the agency’s commitment to using the limited resources provided by Congress in a way that best promotes public safety, border security and the integrity of the immigration system,” ICE said in a prepared statement.
The Obama administration ultimately set a record for deportations in the fiscal year that ended in September, expelling 409,849 people, the most in ICE’s history. That is up 3 percent from the year before, when the previous record was set at 396,906. Of those deported last year, more than half had been convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, according to ICE.
Among the ideas ICE highlighted in the emails: seeking access to state records of temporary driver licenses issued to foreign-born applicants and driver license applications that had been rejected. ICE said it has not pursued that idea, though it did not say why.
Still, critics blasted the tactic as an invasion of privacy.
“That is some scary Big Brother stuff, isn’t it?” said Carolina Antonini, a local immigration attorney who teaches immigration law at Georgia State University.
However, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform said it makes sense for ICE to work with state and local authorities. He said the Obama administration is not doing enough.
“The very fact that [the government] needs to send out a directive telling agents to step up enforcement because they are running low at the end of the year indicates the existing directive is non-enforcement,” said Bob Dane, a spokesman for FAIR, a Washington-based organization that supports tougher immigration enforcement.
Venturella, the former ICE official, did not respond to requests for comment. He now works as an executive vice president of corporate development for Geo Group, a company that operates detention centers housing ICE detainees. A GEO spokesman referred questions to ICE.
Venturella, however, told USA Today that some ICE officials worried a decline in criminal deportations might be publicly linked to the Obama administration’s policy of closing low-priority cases. He added they “seemed to think their careers depended on that number going up,” and they held daily meetings on how to make it happen.
Officials with the ACLU of North Carolina said they obtained ICE’s correspondence after its officers detained numerous immigrants at a local traffic safety checkpoint in Jackson County, N.C., and sought to deport them. Marty Rosenbluth, an attorney for 10 of the immigrants, said he raised concerns in immigration court about unlawful search and seizure and racial profiling connected to the checkpoint.
ICE officials said they discontinued the tactic because it resulted in few deportations, making it a poor use of resources.
Arturo Hernandez Martinez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, was among those detained. He said he was arrested for driving with a suspended license. Federal authorities initially sought to deport him, he said, then later administratively closed his case.
“[It] was a big surprise for me when the officers sent me to the other area, away from their checkpoint,” he said. “The immigration officers were hidden there and asked me about my status here, and they took me because I don’t have papers.”
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